Pseudonym of Henrietta Prouty aka Henrietta Trefon
Author, Poet, Freelance Writer
Born December 29, 1895, Galena, Kansas
Died December 21, 1962, Los Angeles city or county, California
Mary Sharon was the pseudonym of Henrietta Prouty, who was born on December 29, 1895, in Galena, Kansas. Her parents were William Harrison Prouty, a mineworker, and Evalina Melvina "Dolly" (Maitland) Prouty. If I have counted correctly, there were eight Prouty children in all, seven girls and a boy. One of the daughters died on the day she was born.
In reading about Henrietta Prouty and her husband in contemporaneous newspaper accounts, you start to wonder what was true about them and what was mere fancy. Or maybe I should say that you start to realize how little seems to have been true and how much was very likely made up. Did she really know Douglas Fairbanks? Was she really a film actress? Did she really write scenarios and form her own movie production company during the early 1920s? I don't think anyone can say.
And then you run upon a fact:
On May 31, 1919, Henrietta Prouty married a man named Van Simon Trefon (1886-1971) in Los Angeles, California. He was supposed to have been French. In actuality, he was a native of Salonika, Greece. Maybe he was a Frenchman born in Greece.
Then the questions begin again. Did Trefon really arrive in America while working for the Pathé film company? Was he really a stage and movie actor who performed with Madame Petrova, Norma Talmadge, Mary Pickford, and Broncho Billy Anderson? Was he really a linguist, possessing a mastery of ten languages and attaining the rank of captain in the U.S. Army while working in the foreign secret service? Again, I don't think anyone can say.
Neither Mary Sharon nor Van S. Trefon is in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). That may not mean a lot. There are probably myriads of films, actors, directors, photographers, and so on not listed there. Besides that, IMDb has a screwy new format. You can't be sure of finding anything. Mary Sharon or Henrietta Trefon is supposed to have written the scenario for a movie called The Redemption of John Williams in which she was to have played the female lead and her husband was to have been "the heavy lead." Directed by Hoddy Milligan and produced by Ozark Film Company, the movie was shot, in part, in Galena in 1921. Hundreds of people were supposed to have witnessed all of that, but did it really happen? Maybe. Probably. Karl Hoddy Milligan (1881-1951) was a real person. He's listed as a maker of local movies in Main Street Movies: The History of Local Film in the United States by Martin L. Johnson (2018). Maybe The Redemption of John Williams is hiding in its pages under a different title. Maybe Desert Lure, also shot by Ozark Film Company in Galena, also with Van S. Trefon in the heavy lead, is there, too. Or maybe all of these things--all of the films and all of the facts behind them--are now lost.
A newspaper item from 1923 is more down to earth. It announced that Trefon and his wife were establishing an office in Galena for showing slide shows of comic moving pictures. This was to have been in outdoor venues in the city. Enumerated in the 1925 Kansas state census in Galena, Trefon called himself a film photographer. The couple had three young daughters at the time, a pair of twins aged four and a seven-month-old baby. Trefon's name showed up again in newspaper articles of the 1930s when he was a cameraman and independent film producer. Using the stage name Barbara Sharon, his youngest daughter was supposed to have been in the Our Gang comedies.
The Trefons were divorced on November 17, 1934. Nonetheless, Henrietta continued to use her husband's surname as her own. She lived in Culver City, California, as of April 1, 1935. In 1940, calling herself a freelance writer, she was lodging in Los Angeles with her daughters, Marjorie Derelys, aged fifteen, and Barbara Dolores, aged twelve. I don't know where her other two daughters, the twins Lorraine Erma and Maureen Mary, were at the time. If they weren't already married, they soon would be.
In 1945, Henrietta renounced any allegiance to a foreign country and was repatriated as an American citizen despite never having lived abroad. She may have been required to do this because of her marriage to a foreign national. She gave her occupation at the time as "free lance news and magazine feature writer."
In 1950, Henrietta was in Los Angeles and living with her daughter Lorraine Lawrence and Lorraine's two daughters. There had been some drama a few years before involving another of her daughters, Barbara McGlynn. At holiday time 1946, Barbara, separated from her husband and facing eviction from her tiny apartment, drank caustic poison. Fortunately for herself and her baby daughter, she only suffered a burned mouth. Unfortunately she was unable to avoid eviction.
Henrietta Prouty Trefon, aka Mary Sharon, died on December 21, 1962, in Los Angeles city or county, California. She was only a few days short of her sixty-seventh birthday. Tragedy struck a little more than a month later, on January 23, 1963, when her daughter, Barbara Dolores "Bobby" Trefon Eaton and Barbara's four-year-old son died in a house fire. Two of Henrietta's other daughters, Maureen and Marjorie, were blessed with very long lives. I don't know what happened to Lorraine, but I hope she enjoyed a long life, too.
Mary Sharon's Letter, Poem, & Stories in Weird TalesLetter to "The Eyrie" (written from Galena, Kansas) (June 1923)
"The Ghost" (poem, Feb. 1924)
"The Door of Doom" (Feb. 1924)
"The Cat of Chiltern Castle" (Sept. 1926)
Maureen died in her 90s and Laureen is still living, I believe she is 103
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